CHAPTER TWO
He waited until he parked in his usual spot before checking the message. He was right in assuming it was from Vic or Kim. The message was from Vic, a simple, straight-to-the-point text: Need you in the Nest when you get in. Task force has something.
Special Agent Rebecca Marsh was in her late thirties with dark hair cut short, hanging just above her shoulders.
She had transferred from the FBI's Counterterrorism Division a month ago specifically to join the task force.
Miles had heard she was ruthlessly analytical, the kind of agent who could process massive amounts of data and find patterns others missed.
The other agent present was David Masters from Homeland Security.
He was in his forties, wearing the kind of suit that looked expensive but understated.
Masters had a background in predictive analytics and had helped develop some of the algorithms the task force used to identify potential disciples.
Miles pushed open the door and entered. Vic looked up from the table and gave him a slight nod.
"Thanks for coming so quickly," she said. "Marsh and Masters have been working a lead out of Louisiana. They think they might have something."
Marsh stepped forward and gestured to the monitor, which displayed a case file with several photographs attached.
There was no hello or how-ya-doing. As always, Marsh got straight to the point.
"Patricia Brennan, forty-six years old, lives in Baton Rouge.
Her husband died three weeks ago from what the local coroner ruled as acute lead poisoning.
The death certificate lists the cause as accidental exposure, but the circumstances raised some red flags in our system. "
Miles moved closer to examine the photographs. They showed a man in his fifties, clearly deceased, lying in what looked like a hospital bed. The skin had a grayish pallor that Miles recognized from his years working with toxicology cases.
"What kind of red flags?" Miles asked.
Masters pulled up another screen showing a timeline.
"Thomas Brennan worked as an accountant.
No industrial exposure to lead, no hobbies that would involve heavy metals.
The coroner found elevated lead levels in his blood that were consistent with chronic exposure over several months. But there was no obvious source."
"And the wife?" Vic asked.
"She works as a dental hygienist," Marsh said.
"She has no criminal record, no connection to Kane that we can find through our usual channels.
But the death fits a pattern we're watching for. Unexplained poisoning using an element from the periodic table, and a victim with no clear occupational exposure.”
Miles studied the timeline Masters had displayed.
The progression of Thomas Brennan's symptoms matched what he would expect from chronic lead exposure.
Fatigue, abdominal pain, cognitive decline.
The man had been to three different doctors over the course of four months before the final hospitalization.
"Have you spoken to the coroner?" Miles asked.
"Not yet," Marsh said. "We wanted to brief you and Stone first, get your assessment before we started making official inquiries."
Vic crossed her arms. "What's the local PD saying?"
"They closed the case after the coroner's ruling," Masters said. "Accidental death, no signs of foul play. Patricia Brennan cooperated fully with their investigation. She even volunteered for a polygraph, which she passed."
Miles walked to the table in the center of the room and sat down.
The Elementalist Task Force had been operational for six weeks now, a joint effort between the FBI and Homeland Security that had been sold to the public as a proactive measure to identify Kane's disciples before they could act.
The reality was more complicated. The team used a combination of criminal histories, pattern recognition, and what little they knew about Kane's movements and associations to build profiles of potential disciples.
It was exhaustive work that required sifting through hundreds of cases looking for patterns that might not exist.
The media attention around the task force had been mostly negative.
Civil liberties groups had raised concerns about pre-crime surveillance.
Budget hawks in Congress questioned whether federal resources should be spent trying to predict murders that might never happen.
The fact that the task force had not yet confidently identified any new, potential disciples only added fuel to those criticisms. Miles understood the skepticism.
But he also understood that Kane's network was still out there, still operating and extremely unpredictable.
If the task force could identify even one disciple before they killed, it would be worth the investment.
"Let's call the coroner," Miles said. "Get the details on the autopsy. If this is legitimate lead poisoning, there should be a clear pathway of exposure."
Marsh pulled out her phone and scrolled through her contacts. "I have the number here—a direct line. Dr. Samuel Rodrigues, Orleans Parish Coroner's Office." She put the call on speaker and set the phone on the table.
The phone rang four times before a man's voice answered. "Hello, this is Sam."
"Dr. Rodrigues, this is Special Agent Rebecca Marsh with the FBI,” she said. Her tone was flat but not entirely robotic. “I'm calling about a case you handled three weeks ago. Thomas Brennan, ruled as accidental death by lead poisoning."
There was a pause. "I remember that case. What's the FBI's interest?"
"We're following up on some patterns we've been tracking for a much larger case. Can you walk me through your findings?"
Rodrigues sighed, the sound crackling through the speaker.
"Thomas Brennan presented with classic symptoms of chronic lead exposure.
Blood led level was 80 micrograms per deciliter, which is severely elevated.
The toxicology showed evidence of ongoing exposure over at least three to four months based on hair sample analysis. "
"Did you identify a source?" Miles asked.
"Who's speaking?"
"Special Agent Miles Sterling, also FBI."
"The source wasn't immediately obvious," Rodrigues said.
"But when we investigated the home environment, we found the answer. The Brennans had been doing renovation work on their house. It's an older property, built in the 1940s. They were sanding down walls in several rooms to repaint. The paint underneath had high levels of lead. We’re talking way off the charts sort of amounts.”
Masters was already typing on his laptop, pulling up property records. Miles watched as information populated the screen. The Brennan house was indeed built in 1947, well before lead-based paint was banned for residential use.
"Did they use respirators during the renovation?" Vic asked.
"That's the thing," Rodrigues said. "The wife told us Thomas refused to wear one.
Said it made him feel claustrophobic and that he had difficulty breathing in it.
He was sanding down walls for hours at a time, breathing in the dust. She wore a respirator herself and didn't have any elevated lead levels. "
Miles felt the case deflating in real time. This was not a disciple. This was a man who had poisoned himself through ignorance and stubbornness while renovating his own home.
"Were there any suspicious circumstances around the renovation?" Marsh asked, though Miles could hear the doubt creeping into her voice. "Any indication that someone might have encouraged him not to wear protection?"
"Not that I found. The wife was actually the one who kept trying to get him to wear the respirator. She showed me text messages where she'd been nagging him about it for weeks. Even threatened to stop helping with the renovation if he didn't take safety seriously."
"Thank you, Dr. Rodrigues," Miles said. "We appreciate your time."
Marsh ended the call and looked at the group. "So that's another dead end."
"Another dead end," Vic confirmed.
Masters closed his laptop. "This makes ten cases we've ruled out in the past two weeks. All of them look promising on paper but every damned one of them turned out to be accidents, natural causes, or unrelated homicides."
Miles stood and walked to the window. Outside, he could see other agents moving through the parking lot, heading to their own cases and investigations. The task force was doing good work, thorough work. But good work that went nowhere was still just spinning wheels.
"The problem is scale," Miles said. "We have no idea how many more disciples are actually out there. Could be five. Could be fifty. And we're trying to find them by looking for patterns in deaths that might not even be connected to Kane."
"The alternative is waiting for them to kill," Marsh said. "At least this way we're trying to get ahead of it."
"I know, I know." Miles turned back to face the room.
"I'm not criticizing the effort. I'm just saying we need to be realistic about what we can accomplish. And quite honestly, while the added expertise is certainly appreciated, I don’t know how much we can realistically do from a conference room in DC. "
Vic moved to stand beside him. "The media is already calling us a waste of resources. If we don't identify an actual disciple soon, Congress is going to pull funding."
“After just six weeks?” Miles asked, irritated.
“That’s how federal spending works,” Marsh said dryly.
"Then we keep working while we have the time," Masters said. "We refine our algorithms, expand our search parameters. Eventually we'll find one."
Miles wanted to believe that. He wanted to think that all this effort would eventually pay off, that they would catch a disciple before they could kill rather than after. But six weeks of work had produced nothing but false positives and dead ends.
"What's next on the list?" Miles asked.
Marsh pulled up a new file on the monitor.
"We have three cases flagged for review. One in Oregon involving possible mercury poisoning and another one in Texas where a woman died from what might be sodium-related complications. And there’s one in Florida with suspicious circumstances around oxygen use.
But if oxygen has already been used, I don’t know how likely it is that Kane would want that repeated. "
Miles looked at the three case summaries displayed on the screen.
Each one would require hours of investigation, phone calls to local authorities, deep dives into the victims' backgrounds and relationships.
And each one would probably turn out to be another accident, another coincidence, another case of the task force seeing patterns where none existed.
But they would investigate anyway. Because the alternative was doing nothing. And doing nothing meant more victims, more disciples completing their missions, more of Kane's philosophy spreading through the country.
"Split them up," Miles said. "Marsh, you take Oregon. Masters, you take Texas. I'll handle the Florida case."
"What about me?" Vic asked.
"You and I are still the response team," Miles said. "When an actual disciple surfaces, we're the ones who go. But until then, we can help with the screening."
Marsh and Masters gathered their materials and left the conference room. Vic remained, looking at the monitor with its three new case files waiting to be investigated.
"You think any of these are real?" she asked.
"No," Miles said honestly. "But I hope I'm wrong."
Vic nodded and headed for the door. Miles stayed in the Nest for a few more minutes, staring at the case files and thinking about the enormous task they had taken on.
Just knowing that Kane's disciples were actively planning their next moves, following their twisted missions, made it hard to focus on much of anything else. The task force was supposed to find them before they could act and right now, he had to not think like the higher-ups. He knew six weeks really wasn’t that long for a project to be determined pass or fail.
Still, with nothing more than ten dead ends to show for their efforts so far, Miles was beginning to wonder if they were looking for ghosts.